In recent years, social networking applications have become increasingly popular. A social networking application provides its users with a public platform on which the users may create personal profiles, establish personal connections and networking, message/communicate with other users, publish announcements, share information with the public or within a defined group of users and learn information about their connections. For example, LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking service. LinkedIn enables its users, including employers and people who seek employment, to create profiles and connections to each other in an online social network which may represent real-world professional, educational and organizational relationships. Meanwhile, Facebook, although started as a college students' social networking service, now provides its social networking service to hundreds of millions of users worldwide.
In the athletic and sports fields, various organizational websites including national athletic governing bodies, schools, and leagues, for example, may provide publicly available data for professional athletes and non-professional athletes, including juniors (children) and adults. For example, the United States Tennis Association (“USTA”) is the not-for-profit national governing body for the sport of tennis in the United States, and collects, hosts and publishes tennis news, scores, records, rankings, information on tennis leagues, tennis tournaments, and related links. While the USTA and other national governing bodies and organizations provide various websites with data on competitions, including competition data with rankings and records, most data appear as static files that may be updated on a regular basis, i.e., daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, etc. There are little to no real-time updates, little to no notifications or push notifications, and no multi-directional/degree relationships between the players. Further, while there is a good amount of USTA data available online, the data is often parsed into and presented as separate silos of information, the data is static, and the data is one dimensional. For example, a player's records and a player's rankings are not readily available together at a glance, and one needs to toggle back forth between different browser screens and search queries, or leave a player's rankings and then perform a new search to view the player's records, or vice versa. Thus, the data that is available publicly may present information as just a subset of available data, and may not necessarily include complete histories over time or across various geographical districts/sections and/or demographic categories. Moreover, the data that is available through the USTA is one dimensional since it only relates primarily to one player and not to multiple players through a social graph. What is available now, especially for amateur athletes, is rather rudimentary and typically limited by recall of a player's or parent's memory, word of mouth and incomplete online information. As the number of competitions that a player competes in increases, the volume of competition data increases as does the interactions and interconnections between the athletes.
There exists a need for the athletes, and/or their coaches and parents, or anyone interested in the particular sport to create their own social graph (sport graph) that contains various interconnections to other athletes, and progress timelines for the athletes that enables users to access data, including records, rankings, skills, competencies, ratings, etc. in one location.
The present invention provides the athletes, parents, friends, coaches, fans, and anyone else who is interested in the athletes and the sport(s) an online platform to create a social (sport) graph between the athletes and friends, and to help connect athletes, athlete's parents and the coaches. In addition to the publicly available data from various competition data sources, the present invention enables the users to create personalized records of each competition, and presents to users aggregated records and rankings over a time period and across various divisions, demographic groups, as well as geographic areas/sections. Further, the present invention can retrieve the records and rankings of an athlete from a remote database, store the competition data on the social network's database, and display the records and rankings data over a time period and across various divisions, demographic groups, as well as geographic districts/sections on a client computing device. Further, the present invention allows athletes or other authorized parties to manually input competition data including match play records, tournament results, etc. to augment the competition data in the system's database. Further, the present invention creates interrelationships between athletes by showing results, including win-loss records, scores, and degrees of separation (e.g., first, second, third, fourth degrees etc.) between athletes, thus facilitating the users to gather more information on the skills and competitive levels of the opponents and potential opponents relative to the athletes in their network or extended networks. Further, the present invention enables the users to sort competition data by athletes and opponents to show interconnections and degrees of separation between athletes, opponents and potential opponents. The present invention may further allow athletes, friends, parents and coaches to create their own social (sports) graph about interconnections to other athletes, through friendship and/or competition, and progress timelines for skills and athletic results of the athletes.
The sport of tennis is used herein for illustration only. The invention is not limited to the sport of tennis, however, but includes all sports, both individual and team sports. Moreover, the embodiments are not limited to sports, but are equally useful for any competitive community (i.e., chess, video games, spelling bees) of users.